Killing Is My Business

by Adam Christopher

  “The thing I can’t figure out,” I said, “is whether the men from the Department of Robot Labor are here for you or the old man. I’m thinking both.” I waved around the computer room. “And they sure as hell are going to love all this. Quite the operation. You brought the plans with you from Colombia and you used Falzarano’s deep pockets to recreate it all in California? Isn’t that right, Professor Blanco?”

  Carmina stopped and raised an eyebrow and then a smile appeared. It wasn’t the trademark curl of before because this time it was the real thing.

  “You are remarkably well informed,” she said.

  “I have a remarkably good source,” I said. “Falzarano. Where is he?”

  “Why do you want to know?” She took a step away from me but she was slow and I was fast. I grabbed her wrist. She yelped in surprise. Then she pulled but my grip was firm. I squeezed her wrist. She yelped again and this time it was in pain.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  “The old man. Now.”

  She scowled and pulled with her arm but I didn’t let go. The scowl turned into a hiss and she nodded back to the wall panel she’d stepped through before.

  “He’s in there.”

  I moved over and I pulled the professor with me.

  “But he’s not ready to be moved,” she said. I stopped where I was and I looked down at her. “Not yet, anyway.”

  Moving him wasn’t on my itemized agenda so I ignored her and continued to the door. Carmina complained all the way.

  I went through the doorway and into a short white corridor. The wall at the end slid open as I approached. I went through and I pulled Carmina with me.

  The room beyond was like the computer room except it was missing the computers. It was square with a blue ceiling and white walls and a white floor. Instead of mainframes lining the walls, the room was lined with shelves. There were more shelves running in four rows down the center of the room. There was a single computer console against one room covered in flashing lights. It had a telephone handset built into it.

  It was a storage room, not entirely unlike the storage room back at my office.

  Except what was being stored in this room was not memory tapes, boxed and labeled and saved for a rainy day.

  The room was storing something else entirely.

  I let go of Carmina and I walked up to the shelf nearest. I cast my eye up and down and I slowly walked along the shelves.

  They were heads. They were all metal. Some were big and some were small. Some were square, nothing more than upturned buckets. Some were more elegantly sculpted. Some had lenses and grilles. Some had a vague approximation of human features. Triangular noses and triangular eyebrows and cheekbones machined from steel and titanium and other metals in other colors.

  I kept walking. I forgot all about Carmina. All I could think about were the heads.

  Robot heads. There were dozens of them. Maybe even hundreds. All lined up on the shelves, shelves that filled the whole room.

  I stepped closer to the head nearest. It had a dark bronzed finish, like my own skin. The top of the head was flat. The eyes were two round saucers that looked ceramic. The mouth was a row of ceramic squares, eight of them lined up underneath a nose that looked like the folded wings of a paper airplane.

  The shelf had a label on it, just below the head. It said DORL-88-55.

  I looked at the heads next to it. On this shelf they were all almost the same, just a slight variance in condition more than anything. Some looked new—DORL-88-55 included. Some looked a little rough, a little bent at the edges, a little rusty around the ceramic eye dishes.

  They were all labeled DORL.

  I stepped back. I looked around. Every head had a label. The whole collection was catalogued.

  “Ah, my friend Ray, my good friend Ray, how pleased I am that you are here, ah, ah, ah?”

  I turned at the voice, a voice I recognized, a voice that belonged to an old man I had once saved from certain death and whom I’d last seen plugged into a computer bank like me.

  Like a robot.

  Falzarano walked toward me, glancing at the shelves around him, trailing a finger along the labels. He looked good, back to his old self, which I put down to the fact that he was still plugged in at the chest. Except it wasn’t to a computer bank, it was to a metal briefcase that hung in his right hand, the cable from his chest connecting to a port on the flat side. He must have seen me looking at the case because he lifted it up and tapped it with the underside of a ring on his other hand.

  “Thank you for the vital components,” he said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. You arrived just in time, my friend, my good friend. Just in time.”

  Right then I felt the mark on my back plate like it was as wide and as deep as the Grand Canyon and my diagnostic log pushed a message loud and clear into my central processor.

  Error 66.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said, and then I nodded at Carmina. “Your friendly scientist needed parts, and quick, but she couldn’t get me open in time. Hence a quick, if unexpected, shopping trip to Thornton’s lab.”

  For a moment I thought I remembered two voices, a man and a woman, the pair not quite arguing but their conversation getting a little on the hot side as they fussed around by my back plate.

  Then it was gone, a fragment overwritten in a microsecond. Error 66 sure had done a number on my memory tape.

  Carmina just smiled and lifted her chin in a way that was both noncommittal and entirely guilty. She didn’t seem to feel like talking so I kept going.

  “Of course I don’t know how it’s done,” I said. “I had a look at our old friend Stefano. He seems dead enough. Then there was the other guard killed during Ellis’s escape. So they’re still people. Improved perhaps, a little electronic wizardry here and there, but still people. Mr. Falzarano, on the other hand—well, if this is some kind of electronic immortality you’ve come up with then I have to congratulate you, Professor Blanco. I’m sure the folk outside are going to want a very long conversation about your work.”

  At this Falzarano laughed and the smile fixed on Carmina’s face flickered and when it came back on it was perhaps a little dimmer than before.

  I gestured to the shelf behind me. “Quite a collection you have here,” I said.

  Falzarano nodded. “I wish I could have shown you all of this with, shall we say, a little more … preparation. But no matter, Ray, no matter.” Falzarano looked around. His face broke into a grin. “But I am glad you appreciate it all. This is the place I keep my special treasures. There are examples here of nearly every machine that your federal robot program produced before that program was ended. March twenty-sixth, 1959. And after that, all the robots were recalled and destroyed.”

  He paused and laid a hand on the face of one of the heads, a silver thing that was nearly spherical with no optics or other features. “But, such things, they take time, Ray, my friend, they take time. Many machines had been made. The recall was a huge operation, huge. So I was able to save these myself—these are all the central processing units, you understand, yes?” He tapped the silver head. “Within, Thornton’s miracle machine, the positronic computational brain. It has taken me many years of searching and much of my fortune to salvage these parts, but my collection is nearly complete.”

  “Nearly complete?”

  “Why, yes, Ray, my son.”

  Falzarano moved across the shelf to the one I was at. He pointed to a space at the end of the row. Room enough for another head. There was already a label in place below where the new artifact would sit.

  “DORL-26-59a,” he read. Then he turned to me. Behind him, Carmina pushed herself off the wall and unfolded her arms. Her curled smile was brighter than ever.

  “Also known,” Falzarano continued, “as Raymond Electromatic.”

  37

  I read the label on the shelf.

  DORL-26-59a

  Department of Robot Labor Enterprise Project 26-59a.

  Or
in other words, the last robot ever built. Raymond Electromatic, onetime private detective, full-time private assassin.

  Falzarano clapped his hands again. I turned from the shelf to him and he nodded and smiled like I thought his plan to add me to his collection was as sweet as apple pie.

  “But what do you want all this for?” I asked. I pointed at his steel briefcase. “If you’re a robot, or at least partially one, then you’re nothing like what Thornton built for the program. Everything in your collection is hardened alloys and electric circuits. Just like me, DORL-26-59a. But you—you are anything but. Whatever is keeping you going is years, decades ahead of the DORL.”

  Falzarano nodded and pursed his lips. Carmina leaned against the old man’s side and did some more of that head tilting like she couldn’t help it. Falzarano smiled at her and patted her head.

  “You were right, at least partially,” she said. “What did you call it? Electronic immortality? You are close, but even you would not be able to understand the techniques I have developed.”

  Falzarano nodded and looked up at me. “Do you know how old I am, Ray, ah, ah? Well, let me tell you. Next week I turn one hundred and one years.”

  He held a finger up in the air like he was silencing an objection I just hadn’t had time to think of yet.

  “Oh yes, oh yes,” he said. “People, they live to this age. This is not magic. But I have old bones, my friend, old bones. I should be dead a long time now. A long time now.”

  “Except you aren’t,” I said.

  Carmina smiled and gave Falzarano a little kiss on the cheek. “Electronic immortality,” she said, “so long as we can get the right parts.”

  I frowned on the inside. “So that’s why you need her,” I said. “An expert roboticist, one perhaps with political, maybe criminal, leanings in your direction. She supposedly dies in the Colombian Civil War so you can bring her back here to keep you alive and well in the heart of Hollywood.”

  Carmina laughed. “Very astute.”

  “Astute is hardwired into my permanent store.”

  Carmina laughed again.

  “But while she’s here,” I continued, “you get her to work on something else. Maybe it was the original plan before you got sidetracked with saving your own life. It started with this collection. How long did it take to get all the heads? Years?” I turned to the shelf nearest and looked at the faces of my brothers. “You salvaged the heads because that’s what you needed. Get enough of them, maybe you could extract Thornton’s master programs. My creator was one of a kind, a genius. Nobody could match him. So you use your organization to make Professor Carmen Blanco an offer. Come to America, help design and build a robot factory. She’s got the know-how, you’ve got the money. A man with your means, it’s easy. You pay off Vaughan Delaney at the city planning office to get permission to build the factory somewhere where nobody will bat an eyelid, and you hire Emerson Ellis’s company to build it. I guess you probably used both of them for work before. You have your claws hooked pretty deep all over Los Angeles, after all.”

  Falzarano nodded and then he opened his arms and looked around the shelves.

  “One hundred and twelve positronic computational units. One hundred and twelve pieces of Thornton’s master program.” He pulled himself off Carmina and went back to the big silver robot head. He laid a hand on its curved dome, fingers splayed like he was feeling for phrenological bumps, and he narrowed his eyes. “Inside each and every one of these electric brains are the secrets, yes? Each and every one contains the blueprints and the master program for themselves. That is why the electric brain is so important.” He curled his hand into a fist and knocked on the top of the silver head. “If I can get in here and break the codes, yes, yes, then those secrets will be mine. And with my factory I will be able to make my own robots, ah? Think of that, my son, think of that. Those men out there, my men—yes, they are men. True, they are, how shall we say … altered. But they are still men. Unreliable, expensive men. What I have to pay them! Ah! What better than to have men made out of metal. Men I can control, who do not need to be paid, who do not need to sleep or eat or drink. Who are not distracted, ah? Who are incapable of betrayal, ah?”

  I nodded. “Oh, I get it, believe me. The perfect gang. The robot mafia. But you haven’t quite cracked it yet, have you? Thornton encrypted his code well enough.” I walked along the shelf. I looked at the robot heads. All DORL salvage. All supposedly destroyed when the federal government cancelled the robot program. Falzarano’s collection seemed pretty big, but the federal robot program had produced tens of thousands of machines of all different sorts over the course of a decade. Despite his proud boast, Falzarano’s little stash only represented a tiny fraction of the total.

  But even so.

  “Thing is,” I said, “possession of robot parts is a federal crime.” I turned back to the professor and her mentor. “And the Department of Robot Labor isn’t as decommissioned as you might think.” I pointed to the door. “They’re here, now, and I have a feeling they want all this back. I don’t know if they knew it was all here, not unless their mole found your secret door. He was here about your factory plans. All this? This might be a bonus. Who knows. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.” I stepped closer to Carmina. “It was probably a bad idea, sending me and Alfie to Thornton’s old lab. They must have had the place under surveillance, after the accident that got it all sealed up. They’d been watching this house for a while and then they find me and Alfie breaking into the lab. They knew something was happening, maybe faster than they thought, especially after their agent on the inside suddenly becomes incommunicado. I hate to say it, but I think the game is up, folks.”

  “How right you are, Charlie.”

  I turned my head at the voice and Falzarano and Carmina turned theirs too.

  Alfie Micklewhite came walking into the storage room, smile on his face and big gun in his hand. Only it wasn’t the gun he’d taken from Stefano but something entirely different, something made of silver and glass, with an odd fat barrel shaped like a pinecone, the size and shape about right for the gun I’d seen the DORL agent carrying out in the woods before Alfie had killed him and stolen the weapon. Inside the glass pinecone were densely packed filaments and wires. I didn’t know what the gun did exactly but it was pointed in my direction and I had no immediate plans to find out what would happen to me if he squeezed the trigger.

  Alfie moved over to Carmina and Falzarano. The professor and her mentor didn’t seem too agitated. I still didn’t know why Francis Cane was calling himself Alfie Micklewhite or what International Automatic was, but it was clear that he was in on it with the other two.

  That was when the telephone began to ring.

  It was on the console behind me. It rang twice more and nobody moved. Then it rang a third time and Alfie flicked his wrist and the gun held in that hand.

  “Answer it, Charlie, will you?” he said.

  “What if it isn’t for me?”

  Alfie laughed. He adjusted his glasses with his free hand. “Of course it’s bloody well for you, isn’t it? Your boss, the lovely Ada. Answer it then pass me over.”

  I watched the big gun in Alfie’s hand as I picked up the telephone. There was one question on my mind and I think Ada knew just what it was.

  “Well, you have to admit, it was worth a shot,” she said.

  “Ada,” I said.

  “I guess it was insurance, more than anything. A preemptive strike, isn’t that what they call it?”

  “Who is it?”

  “I think I read about that in Time magazine one time.”

  “Ada, who is it?”

  “Or was it Harper’s?”

  Alfie’s eyes narrowed. He cocked his head, like he was trying to hear what Ada was saying. Which was impossible for him, of course. He waved his free hand at me to get me to hand the telephone over. That wasn’t going to work either so I just ignored him.

  “Who’s the client, Ada?”

  �
�Ray—”

  “Who’s the client. Tell me.”

  Ada sighed. “Okay, fine, you want in, you get in.”

  She took a healthy draw on her cigarette. She held it a long time and then she breathed it out.

  “It’s me, Ray,” she said.

  Somewhere I heard the ticking of the fast hand of a stopwatch.

  “The client is me.”

  38

  “Oi, that’s enough of that, Charlie.”

  Alfie snatched the telephone out of my hand. He waved his magic gun at me and I backed away while he put the phone to his ear.

  “Hello? Ada? You listening?”

  Alfie frowned and I saw his eyes narrow behind his glasses. I could imagine what he was hearing on the phone: nothing but the roar of the sea, far away. That was part of Thornton’s trick, part of the design of a robot and his computer who had to talk to each other over the public telephone system. Fill the line with noise and you can hide another signal in there, one that only Ada and I can hear. Proof against bugs and wiretappers and people with magic guns and bad tempers.

  Alfie laughed. He looked up at me. He drew the mouthpiece of the telephone up to his lips.

  “I assume you can hear me even if I can’t hear you. Listen, love, I’ve been dying to have a little chat, I really have. You’re a clever girl, I can see that. But here’s the thing. You tapped IA to get information on me. Which is just fine and dandy, but I’m not sure you did your sums right. Because that meant IA could tap you. See, that means we know where you are, and I’ve got your fella right here in front of me. Sending him in here to do your dirty work … well, I’m not one to judge, am I? He’s the one with the legs, after all. I must admit it was a surprise him turning up like that, but I think IA are going to be pretty happy with him. And you of course, darling. Might be in line for a promotion after all this, eh?”

  Alfie laughed, then he tore his head away from the telephone as a deafening whine of feedback echoed down the line.